Queer Social Counting and the Generational Transitions of Michael Field

Abstract

ABSTRACTKatherine Cooper and Edith Bradley, the poets who collaborated as Michael Field, occupied several generational thresholds as they were publishing work at the fin de siècle: they were two related women, an aunt and a niece, lesbian partners, writing as one man. Each of those thresholds demanded ontological reorientation from the poets. This paper identifies a pattern of transitions from unification to division and back again throughout Michael Field’s work. A series of generational transitions trouble recent critical assertions of Michael Field’s “idealized intimacy” by acknowledging that the wholeness of certain relationships necessitates fluidity, separation, and division. What’s more, they understood that, for queer couples, “one” and two” demanded a new form of social counting. Cooper and Bradley constructed a distinctly queer model of intimacy in their poetry, one perpetually in transition, “never fully owned, but always and only redeployed, twisted, queered from a prior usage and in the direction of urgent and expanding political purposes.” For queer individuals, the ability to leave and return to close relationships enables an individual to assert the integrity both of oneself and one’s relationship. By addressing how Michael Field’s poetry literally, figuratively, and formally anticipates the lover’s incessant departure and return, this article demonstrates the ways in which these queer poets actuate the complexities of generational transition at the turn of the century.